A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, First Edition. Edited by Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğ lu. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 23 Architecture and Court Cultures of the Fourteenth Century Bernard O’Kane Recent scholarship has argued that the thirteenth century was a turning point in world history, when the creation of a Mongol empire stretching from China to Iran caused not only great devastation but was part of the formation of a world system extending the length of the Eurasian landmass (Abu‐Lughod 1989). Other scholars have argued that Islam itself could be seen as a world system, one whose complex of social relations was greatly strengthened from the thirteenth century onwards by the spread of Sufi orders (Voll 1994). Until the emergence of the Black Death in the mid‐fourteenth century began to weaken it, several interlinked economic systems comprised this world system. It was dominated by the Middle East heartland with land routes stretching across Mongol Asia, with subsystems of the Mediterranean basin, the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and China. Scholarship in Islamic art on this period is usually fragmented on geographic or dynastic lines, but a broader perspective on the period can be useful both in dif- ferentiating it from earlier centuries and in highlighting cultural connections to parallel economic ones. With the Mongols’ extinction of the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, the former de facto political fragmentation of the Islamic world was cemented, with fewer dynasties even paying lip‐service to the idea of unified caliphal authority. The arrival of the Mongols brought immediate Chinese artistic influences that only partially penetrated western Islamic lands. But with their conversion to Islam the spread of the religion reached central China in substantial numbers for the first time.